Angelo Reads the Blog

The FOP and Trooper Lodges are bucking Rahm on his recent announcement:

• Police union leaders on Monday urged Mayor Rahm Emanuel to modify his plan to assign 40 state troopers on 30-day loan to Chicago to serve fugitive warrants to get known criminals off the street.
  
  Dean Angelo, president of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7 representing Chicago Police Officers, and Mike Powell, president of the FOP’s Illinois Trooper Lodge No. 41, said it makes more sense to assign state troopers to traffic duty to free Chicago Police officers for the “real police work” chasing fugitives.
  
  “You’re taking troopers from rural areas out of their element and thrusting them into the big city. There should always be concern about that. That’s just a matter of geography,” Powell said.
  
  “The Chicago Police Department knows the city. They know some of the folks they’re looking for. They recognize them. They’ve dealt with them. [Using them to chase fugitives] would be a smarter, better use of resources.”

Rahm isn't budging - it's his idea and his election year. So there. But here's the story we and our readers have been pointing out for a number of years now:

• Emanuel balanced his first budget by eliminating more than 1,400 police vacancies.
  
  Although the mayor has more recently done enough police hiring to keep pace with attrition, Angelo argued Monday that the Chicago Police Department is “anywhere from 1,500 to 2,500 officers down from where we should be manpower-wise.”
  
  Pressed on where the money would come from to bolster police hiring, Angelo said, “We have 50 aldermen. A lot of people would argue that’s too many. I took a pay cut. Maybe that’s something other people should do.”
  
  Angelo also set his sights on the $66 million-a-year aldermanic menu program that gives each of the 50 City Council members $1.32 million to spend on neighborhood infrastructure projects of their own choosing.
  
  “If everybody is so concerned about crime, let’s go to the City Council and ask, `Who wants to give back half of that money to hire more police and make our neighborhoods safer, and if they’re not, why aren’t they?’ You can't have it both ways,” Angelo said.
  
  “Let’s track some of that money. Is it all going to street lights, potholes and sidewalks? Or is it picnics, parades and T-shirts? If $1.3 million in every ward is really going to neighborhood improvements, God bless. Our streets should look like the Autobahn. And we know that’s not happening.”

Let's see....1,400 vacancies - CHECK. Too many aldercreatures - CHECK. Aldermanic menu program of $66 million - CHECK. golly, we could have written this platform three or four years ago - oh wait, we did. But this time, the media actually printed it. We don't know who fell asleep at the presses, but it's about time this saw the light of day.

UPDATE: A couple people are asking why we aren't praising Dean Angelo to the heavens for his statements.

• First up, it's his job. We're glad he's doing it instead of what happened the last three years.
• Second, if he ran for office solely to get praise from the blog, he's in the wrong business.
• Third, as we listed in the last paragraph, none of these things are new to the readers of the blog - our readers and we have been saying this for years now. One of our readers even ran a table showing the proportional representation of Chicago ought to be about 17-to-18 aldercreatures, tops. Our people have done the research, Dean is merely using our stats.
• Fourth and finally, we've told everyone that the FOP calls press conferences more often than you know. The media, with the able assistance of the mayoral press office, decides whether of not to send a camera and/or a scribe to take down the information. Most of the time, they don't, ergo no coverage.

So again, we're glad to see it in the media for however short a time and good for Dean for being Johnny-on-the-spot with the ready quote, but let's not pretend it was anything but what it was.